No Rapture, No Judgment: May 21 Doomsday Prediction Fails

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Are you relieved or disappointed? Doomsday came and went without
a peep, as May 21 failed to bring about earthquakes, a rapture or
the mass excavation of all the world's dead.

The rumor that May 21 would kick off the end of the world was
started and propagated by Harold Camping, the president of the
Oakland, Calif.-based Christian radio broadcasting network Family
Radio. Camping, who also
made a failed doomsday prediction in 1994, had claimed that
his mathematical interpretation of the Bible pointed to May 21 as
the day of the rapture. Earthquakes were supposed to shake the
globe, throwing the dead from their graves as believers' souls
ascended to heaven. Five months later, on Oct. 21, 2011, the
universe was supposed to end.

Camping has not commented publically on the failed prediction.

Camping is far from the first doomsayer to falsely predict the
end of the world. In fact, doomsday experts say that a belief in
the end
is comforting to some people who see the world as
irredeemably evil.

Even centuries of failed predictions can't convince believers
that the end is not near, according to Lorenzo DiTommaso, a
religion professor at Concordia University in Montreal. Religious
doom predictors see their sacred texts as infallible, DiTommaso
said, so any failed predictions are mistakes of interpretation —
and the next interpretation could always be right.